If you broaden your understanding of WSB's definition of winning beyond "making a profit" or "maintaining value" to "taking a loss but having an entertaining ride along the way" then they're winning and have no way to "lose."
Now the SEC or Professional Capitalists making easy money may not want WSB to turn corners of the market into a volatile form of entertainment but it's completely legal AFAIK and illustrates the disparity between what is claimed about the stock market by the wealthy and powerful and what the stock market actually is. If a Wall Street clique-member replaced WSB and behaved the same way it would be fine, at least from a hyperventilating "we have to think of the children/retail investors" standpoint.
Pompeo is a clown who can't even Bangladesh or Ukraine and Haley is long in the tooth. The SD governor Noem has the superficial attractiveness and utter in(s)anity to capture the heart of US right-wingers though.
Some of them were sophisticated enough to see the short squeeze opportunity and realized it was possible to exploit it. Melvin Capital kept pouring more good money after bad in a classic and literal sunk-cost fallacy. This is all completely rational behavior by WSB investors, taking advantage of the short squeeze.
At a fundamental level GME just got a new activist investor/board member with a history of revitalizing retail operations and turning them around. This would be a rational reason to invest in GameStop at a basic level.
This is just the status quo realizing their position can be threatened and the easy money the wealthy have rolling in can be taken by average people acting in concert.
"Free marketeers declare markets a little too free for their tastes"
I've been really enjoying watching this whole thing pan out but you had to know that the 'professional capitalists' who brought us the economic crisis in 2009 would close ranks and appeal to the SEC to save them from the vicious retail investors. Robin Hood doesn't want to be banished to the proverbial wastelands because their customers are more clever than some hedge fund operators.
I think they're pointing out that "the hippies" were a very small % of people their own age with an out-sized popular culture representation that doesn't reflect the sentiments of the rest of that generation.
I find myself patronizing the fast-food locations that offer food prepared from fresh potatoes sliced every morning and grass-fed beef that apparently pay their workers a decent wage while costing about the same as the places that don't. The difference I suppose is that the local chains are not satisfying profit motives of stock speculators.
If Snowden is to be believed --and I personally think he is-- he was transiting through Russia to South America after fleeing Hong Kong and we all remember the forced landing of the official plane of the President of Bolivia. That seems very different than the coziness of certain Americans and what appear to be members of the Putin regime.
I would just explain that I play Cyberpunk 2077 which is set in Night City and that "Breach Protocol" is a minigame inside the main game and that my assumption was that I was going to listen to some cyberpunk music given the .fm tld and by this point everyone from the investigating detectives to the assistant DA and presiding judge would be rolling their eyes and judging me to be some very silly person not worth prosecuting. I hope!
On what is a National Forest but apparently legally Apache land? That's a fair number of hoops to jump through and personally not something I think the US Government should be undertaking for a foreign extractive company like Rio Tinto with such a checkered record and horrendous reputation.
Well US Army mortars tend to be 60-107mm in calibre and designed for anti-infantry use while fireworks are generally designed for aesthetic effects. There is certainly some overlap in the capability of fireworks and mortars to render damage to individuals and groups but this is generally a very limited shared range of effect, with mortars being explicitly designed to kill or incapacitate human targets.
They definitely have a cohesive identity and are even organized in defined specialized identities like militias and Proud Boys. These are domestic terrorists and they attempted to overturn the fair and free elections in this country based on outright lies with NO evidence to support them and also kidnap and murder civilians, law enforcement and anyone else who stood in their way.
I and others have been following their discussions online and its clear that while not every single individual at the domestic insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th seeks to murder and cause mayhem, many in the hundreds and thousands do. Many beyond that seek to downplay the danger and provide apologia for the criminal actions of terrorists they at least partially sympathize with.
There are a lot of people who assume that cryptocurrency is an anonymous way to transmit value and while it's somewhat possible for the technically capable, it's good to educate people about the reality. Cash is often more anonymous than a publicly distributed ledger especially when the recipient and sender addresses are known. I of course do not support terrorism or funding terrorism, but I do support educating people so they don't take a risk they shouldn't have in the first place. Better to donate those funds to a local charity in your community that will provide constructive use for your immediate area.
My mom got me a fitbit for Christmas and I think I'll return it unopened now. I've thought about warning her about this new relationship with Google but she's elderly, it's probably not an issue she cares as much about and I'm the one who introduced her to fitbits in the first place.
Presumably Congress could strip a former President of those benefits as they have in general in the past, which was then reversed during the Obama administration. I assume they could even strip a specific individual of those benefits while leaving them intact for others.
They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...
Can't reply to davewritescode but... BLM as a political movement believes that American law enforcement disproportionately targets black citizens with violence disproportionate to the alleged crimes or situations in which the violence occurs. This is not a far left view in my opinion, as someone who hold "far-left"/left-libertarian views on a variety of subjects. "Defund the police" has been proposed by some people who share this core beliefs proposed by the BLM movement as a way to reduce the disproportionate violence against black citizens in the US. Unfortunately, I think it is a vaguely and poorly phrased slogan because I have seen that for some it means abolishment of law enforcement and for many others it means restructuring the funding of law enforcement to provide alternative public services to people who are having a mental health crisis, for example. The idea of reducing law enforcement budgets or redirecting some of the resources currently budgeted for law enforcement to alternative public services doesn't seem to me to necessarily consist of a "far-left" policy either, though that is because I think the notion of reducing law enforcement violence when unwarranted should and is a concern of people of most citizens other than a distinct minority. Of course we are all awash in the propaganda and media messaging of disparate groups with various agendas so understanding all of this in a shared and cohesive manner as a society is messy and somewhat difficult, but well-worth trying.
Facebook and Whatsapp are effectively the same entity, as the recent requirement of sharing Whatsapp data with Facebook shows. It's basically Microsoft with Windows and IE using special hidden dlls to execute faster than Netscape and that was of course a landmark and exemplary example of anti-trust abuse by a non-monopoly in either OS or browsers. Facebook needs to be broken up and the special ownership rules privileging Mark Zuckerberg need to be removed.